Windows 10: Upgrade to Win10 on a dual-boot machine

Upgrade to Win10 on a dual-boot machine

For some work that I am still doing after retirement I need a dual boot machine consequently my Windows 7 Ultimate lives alongside Ubuntu 12.04 with a shared data partition. Does anyone know if it will be safe to upgrade to Windows 10 without wiping Linux? I am still using Ubuntu 12.04 on this machine because there was some doubt about the safety of upgrading to 14.04.

Thank you.

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Do you have Mini partition wizard installed? If not, you can get it the free version from Major Geeks not Cnet. I just need to see how your drive is partition. I need a screenshot uploaded that shows your partition to see if I can help you. Partition Wizard should have a screenshot selection in the menu.

Do you think you could install Ubuntu 15.04 on your system? They improved hardware support with a lot of systems.
Do you mind doing clean install for Ubuntu?
Do you want to test the preview of windows 10 or do you want to install the release of windows 10 when it comes out?

(Note-my next reply may take a little longer than normal but I will post as soon as I can).

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Thank you very much for very helpful reply. Let me explain the situation with this dual-boot machine and another Ubuntu 14.04 which acts a file server I am busy cataloguing a collection of documents (about 100,000) in many formats from plain ASCII text to ePub and MOBI and many different headings; first name first, surname first, title, numbered etc. There are very many duplicates and this must be condensed into a uniform surname first file. In view of this I think a policy of wait and see is wise. There are 4 other Windows 7 machines involved in bookkeeping and HR so we will try Windows 10 out on one of those. I really cannot cope with re-installations on my machine at this stage.

Thank you again for your very helpful post.

Malcolm Brown

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I had all my other drives (non-bootable ones) marked "dirty" and needed a filesystem check after I first tried windows 10 and then booten into windows 7. I'm sure it also applies if you boot from windows 10 to linux.

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You need to check your video chipset on the Ubuntu 12.04 machine because, if it's an AMD chipset, with a machine that old, it's likely to be one of the HD 2x/3x/4x-series (or older) and AMD dropped Linux driver support for those years ago. If you upgrade a machine with those to any release newer than 12.04.1, you'll lose AMD restricted driver support.

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Thank you very much for very helpful reply. Let me explain the situation with this dual-boot machine and another Ubuntu 14.04 which acts a file server I am busy cataloguing a collection of documents (about 100,000) in many formats from plain ASCII text to ePub and MOBI and many different headings; first name first, surname first, title, numbered etc. There are very many duplicates and this must be condensed into a uniform surname first file. In view of this I think a policy of wait and see is wise. There are 4 other Windows 7 machines involved in bookkeeping and HR so we will try Windows 10 out on one of those. I really cannot cope with re-installations on my machine at this stage.

Thank you again for your very helpful post.

Malcolm Brown

The Amd driver could be a problem even with windows 10 on the one system with 12.04 Ubuntu

The upgrade to windows 10 could be done but it is a little bit more complicated then my level of expertise but there is still a risk of data loss and still having to do a clean install.

See, I have 15.04 xubuntu with windows 7. One issues I came across when using windows 10 and having a triple boot system. Each build release, I had disable grub or it wouldn't upgrade to the next build, windows updates patches didn't have an issue with grub. Another issue to get the triple boot to work, was I had to a do a clean install of xubuntu totally in the extended partition.

WMC will be removed on your computers that you choose to upgraded to windows 10.

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I have a GeForce graphics card installed and I am not sure whether this use AMD drivers.

I set the system up by installing Ubuntu first with 2 2GB partitions and the rest of the 2TB drive as a data partition. Linux went went into one of the 2GB partitions and then I installed Windows 7 into the other. Ubuntu, therefore, controls which OS to boot into. It was tricky but it works very well.

With the work that I am doing I think it will be safer to try Windows 10 on another machine, but there we need to make sure that Quickbooks Pro will be happy. Of course there is the other ruler that it is wise to wait for release x.1 of any Microsoft product.

Life never runs smoothly.

Malcolm

Last edited by oakridge; 17 Jun 2015 at 04:05.

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I set the system up by installing Ubuntu first with 2 2GB partitions and the rest of the 2TB drive as a data partition. Linux went went into one of the 2GB partitions and then I installed Windows 7 into the other. Ubuntu, therefore, controls which OS to boot into. It was tricky but it works very well.

Malcolm

Hi guys,

I know this is an old thread but I have a question related to this: I want to dual boot Ubuntu 14-04LTS with Win 10. So, Malcolm, would you say it's easier to install Ubuntu first then Window 10 as opposed to win10 then linux?

Thanks
D

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When upgrading Windows 7 to 10 the boot loader will be replaced by Windows Setup. After the upgrade is complete, you must boot with an Ubuntu DVD and install Grub again to be able to boot into Ubuntu. Since you are only modifying the Windows partition, you shouldn't lose any data on other partitions. So before you begin, make sure you have a bootable Ubuntu DVD-ROM or USB Flash drive.

As just said, you can install Windows 10 after Ubuntu, but you will have to reinstall Grub. For a new (clean) installation, it is easier to just install Windows 10 first and then Ubuntu which will automatically install Grub to let you dual-boot.

PS: Instead of reinstalling Grub, you can use a utility such as EasyBCD to add a boot entry for Ubuntu at Windows Boot Loader. You could also do it with bcdedit from an elevated command prompt, but it is too complicated for the average user. EasyBCD is far easier with its GUI.

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For a new (clean) installation, it is easier to just install Windows 10 first and then Ubuntu which will automatically install Grub to let you dual-boot.

PS: Instead of reinstalling Grub, you can use a utility such as EasyBCD to add a boot entry for Ubuntu at Windows Boot Loader. You could also do it with bcdedit from an elevated command prompt, but it is too complicated for the average user. EasyBCD is far easier with its GUI.

thanks... will do
D

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